There are three types of article: full, news brief, and special. Article type controls where articles are eligible to appear on your home page. Full articles can appear in your mosaic and special articles can appear in your marquee. News briefs are the least used of the three types of articles. They can appear as a list without photos below the mosaic.
The full rules for news briefs on your home page are:
- up to six
- most recent
- articles of type “headlines”
- that are published
- and featured to the home page
- with a publication date within the past two months
If you have any articles which match those rules, your home page will display them under the header “In Brief” with just their titles and no images or article excerpt.
This is how they look in the design we are using now:
Why Use News Briefs?
News briefs are most useful when you need to post something quickly or when you have news that is important enough to merit space on your home page, but for which you may not have a good image.
Your time is important to us. One of our core goals is to provide ways for site editors to get maximum benefit from minimum effort. In our trainings, we talk about the "minimum price of admission" for posting articles. To post an effective full article, you need:
- a compelling title
- a compelling thumbnail image
- an article excerpt (a paragraph introducing the article)
- a place to go (a full article or a URL)
The minimum price of admission for posting a news brief is lower.
Finding the right image can be difficult. Because news briefs on your home page do not use images, you can get away without the image. We still encourage you to write an article excerpt, but technically you could avoid that as well.
Do We Still Need News Briefs?
As our needs have evolved, so has CHSSWeb, and News Briefs have a bit of a history. But do they have a future? As I write this, only six sites have news briefs on their home pages. Is this because you no longer need them or because we haven't been clear enough about what they are and how to use them?
Site usage of news briefs dropped off when we created article categories, a feature which allows each site's editors to group the articles they create into custom categories. Before this, article type and article category were driven by one setting, so if you categorized your article at all, and you chose not to make it a full article, it was a news brief. Most sites had news briefs without the editors having to think about it.
With the current rules, you must know to set the article type to news brief and then you must choose to feature the article to your home page. The current rules give you maximum control at the cost of ease of use.
So... What Should We Do?
We hope this article encourages you to use news briefs. But if in fact they are no longer of use for our site editors, we could make changes to make them more useful or we could eliminate them.
For instance, we could remove the "feature to home page" constraint, allowing any article of type news brief to appear on the home page without extra effort by site editors. You would still need to know of the "type" setting and use it intentionally, but the cost of admission would be lower.
Or, since the mosaic is limited to three images, we could eliminate the headlines type and repurpose the news brief area of the home page to contain older featured articles which have aged out of the mosaic but which still have recent publication dates. This would give your articles longer life on the home page but would take away the option to get away with articles that don't have images.
There are other options. We would love to hear your ideas in the CHSSWeb user group in Microsoft Teams. Meanwhile, we hope you will keep news briefs in mind as a tool for using your site and your time effectively.
January 26, 2023
